History Fridays: Breaking Club News

Rendering of the show floor layout for the Young Building at the 2018 Railroad Hobby Show.

With the 50th anniversary of the Railroad Hobby Show approaching and our club's 30th anniversary at the show arriving next January, a private donor has stepped forward to fund a massive expansion of the HO scale modular layout to celebrate.  The donor's dream was to see a large classification yard - like the one in Selkirk, NY - be re-created as close to scale as possible. In exchange for the club’s help in building the module set, a new club building will be constructed and several trucks and trailers will be donated to the organization to be able to move the layout from show to show.

An initial rendering of the project, shown above, gives a glimpse at the magnitude of the expansion of the layout.  For the show in 2018, the entire Young Building will be filled with 1,832 feet of modules - 272 feet of which will be the new yard module.  As it will be the highlight of the layout, the new yard module set will be featured prominently at the entrance across from the Better Living Center so visitors can enjoy the working model of the hump yard.  In total, 68 - 3'x8' modules will make up the yard.  The club will also add 310 new modules to its current roster of 82 to fill out the 26 scale miles of mainline around the Young Building.  A new computerized dispatching center will also be constructed to control all of the trains.

The club will need a lot of new members to help with the project.  Stop by at any of our club meetings to volunteer - just use the project's code name: Lirpa Sloof Ya(r)d!